“And behold a plank gives way, and the queer sack falls on me, with its weight on top.  I was pegged down, and the smell of a corpse filled my throat—­on the top of the bundle there was a head, and it was the hair that I’d seen hanging down.

“You understand, one couldn’t see very well; but I recognized the hair ’cause there isn’t any other like it in the world, and then the rest of the face, all stove in and moldy, the neck pulped, and all the lot dead for a month perhaps.  It was Eudoxie, I tell you.

“Yes, it was the woman I could never go near before, you know—­that I only saw a long way off and couldn’t ever touch, same as diamonds.  She used to run about everywhere, you know.  She used even to wander in the lines.  One day she must have stopped a bullet, and stayed there, dead and lost, until the chance of this sap.

“You clinch the position?  I was forced to hold her up with one arm as well as I could, and work with the other.  She was trying to fall on me with all her weight.  Old man, she wanted to kiss me, and I didn’t want—­it was terrible.  She seemed to be saying to me, ’You wanted to kiss me, well then, come, come now!’ She had on her—­she had there, fastened on, the remains of a bunch of flowers, and that was rotten, too, and the posy stank in my nose like the corpse of some little beast.  “I had to take her in my arms, in both of them, and turn gently round so that I could put her down on the other side.  The place was so narrow and pinched that as we turned, for a moment, I hugged her to my breast and couldn’t help it. with all my strength, old chap, as I should have hugged her once on a time if she’d have let me.

“I’ve been half an hour cleaning myself from the touch of her and the smell that she breathed on me in spite of me and in spite of herself.  Ah, lucky for me that I’m as done up as a wretched cart-horse!”

He turns over on his belly, clenches his fists, and slumbers, with his face buried in the ground and his dubious dream of passion and corruption.

18

A Box of Matches

It is five o’clock in the evening.  Three men are seen moving in the bottom of the gloomy trench.  Around their extinguished fire in the dirty excavation they are frightful to see, black and sinister.  Rain and negligence have put their fire out, and the four cooks are looking at the corpses of brands that are shrouded in ashes and the stumps of wood whence the flame has flown.

Volpatte staggers up to the group and throws down the black mass that he had on his shoulder.  “I’ve pulled it out of a dug-out where it won’t show much.”

“We have wood,” says Blaire, “but we’ve got to light it.  Otherwise, how are we going to cook this cab-horse?”

“It’s a fine piece,” wails a dark-faced man, “thin flank.  In my belief, that’s the best bit of the beast, the flank.”

“Fire?” Volpatte objects, “there are no more matches, no more anything.”